Commentary on global affairs and where they may be headed

Posts tagged ‘UK’

It was dinner table chat a few months ago, now the possibility of a second vote on whether to leave the EU is being openly discussed in the media.

The man who has made Brexit his life’s work, Nigel Farage, has even acknowledged it may be necessary to hold a second vote.

Recent polls have suggested a majority across the UK would like to have a say on whatever deal is negotiated between London and the other twenty seven EU capitals – with the choice being accept the agreed deal or stay in.

Opponents of Brexit are beginning to hope it can be stopped and supporters – as Farage’s comments suggest – are beginning to fear it could be.

But is the prospect of a second referendum really on the table?

There are formidable obstacles that need to be overcome if British voters are to get a say on the final deal.

The courage of politicians is one. Another vote requires the Labour Party to step up to the role of Her Majesty’s Opposition and back it. As things stand, with Jeremy Corbyn still effectively supporting Brexit, this still looks a remote possibility despite those recent polls showing growing support among Labour voters.

If Labour were to come out for a second referendum, they would be joining the Lib Dems and Greens who have already called for one. The Scottish National Party would likely join this alliance and potentially – and crucially – some Tory Remainers, who would be needed to overcome the Democratic Unionist votes propping up Theresa May’s government.

Such an outcome would almost certainly face accusations of treachery from the Brexit supporting right wing papers, which may well deter potential Tory rebels – and may well deter Labour too. Although in Keir Starmer Labour has a politician capable of mustering a strong parliamentary campaign for a rethink.

Even though the first referendum wasn’t legally binding, it would be politically impossible to reverse Brexit on basis of a parliamentary vote – it would play into the populist narrative of ‘elite’ politicians ignoring the people’s will.

But that argument and the onslaught of the right wing press could be blunted by the fact that it is the ‘British People’ who would be the ones making the final decision – not politicians or judges.

A second obstacle, which may be insurmountable, is old father time.

Come the morning of 30 March next year, Britain will legally no longer be a member of the EU, whether or not a transition period is agreed, and it is very possible the deal will not have been finalised by then.

So the UK would face the prospect of holding a referendum on that deal after it was no longer a member of the EU.

If the result were a majority to remain in the EU, would London have to apply to rejoin?

This is terra incognita legally and constitutionally, but then, so is the whole Brexit process currently underway. Also, if a transition period is agreed, de facto the UK would still be abiding by all EU law and regulations, so if the other 27 were willing, what would stop a rapid decision that nothing had really changed, so the UK could rejoin without going through the lengthy application process?

Where’s there’s a will, there’s a way – particularly in the EU with its proclivity for fudge.

The final potential fly in the ointment though would be the attitude of the other 27 if the British were to change their minds and say “actually we’d rather stay in after all’,

Would they just say fine, no problem?

After all the disruption and work caused by Brexit so far, the rest might decide the UK should pay a price to stay – such as an end to opt outs (aka special treatment in many other countries) or even the annual rebate.

In this case, opinion in Britain could shift again, egged on by the Europhobic press and politicians.

Potentially a second referendum campaign could see a much better quality of debate and argument given what we now know of the complexities and the economic downside involved in leaving.

Although given the way the UK media works and given the hard line politicians’ penchant for playing fast and loose with facts and realities, Brexiteers would no doubt portray the EU as bullying and unreasonable and point to the talks so far as evidence.

For their part, Remainers would be well advised to avoid the ‘Project Fear’ nonsense of the last campaign and focus on a positive vision of what the EU stands for, reminding people – particularly older voters who may remember the last World War or its aftermath when Europeans were dying in their millions – there’s more to the EU than trade and immigration.

When Theresa May assumed the prime ministership, one of the first trips – not for now a foreign visit – she made was to Edinburgh for talks on Brexit with First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon.

Now it’s Sturgeon’s turn to come to London for talks with Mrs May along with the leaders of the Welsh and Northern Irish Assemblies.

When May went to Scotland it was all smiles and emollience from the new Tory leader –a wise move given Scots had voted to remain in the EU by a much wider margin than England and Wales voted to leave in the referendum a few weeks before.

It was no secret that many supporters of independence would now push for another Scottish referendum to prevent their country being dragged out of the EU against its will.

Twenty six months ago – yes time does fly – at the time of what was known as the Indyref, the supporters of Scotland staying in the Union with England had argued the country could only ensure it stayed in the EU if it remained in the UK

Many at the time, including myself, thought this was a hostage to fortune.

Prime Minister Cameron had already committed to hold the vote on Europe if he won the 2015 UK general election – and – as we’ve now seen – he could not guarantee an EU referendum would see a victory for what would become known as Remain.

So when May met Sturgeon in Edinburgh she promised to listen and consult over Brexit, while Sturgeon largely kept her powder dry taking a wait and see approach to how the new UK leader would handle Brexit.

Two months and a Conservative Party conference later, it is clear Theresa May is veering towards a comprehensive break with the EU – hard Brexit – with pledges to restrict immigration and no guarantee of continued preferential access to the single market or possibly even the customs union.

In response, and probably reluctantly (despite what the London media and Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson might say), Nicola Sturgeon has started the process to legislate for another vote in Scotland on the whether to end the Union with England.

The 2014 Scottish vote was legislated for by Westminster following an agreement between David Cameron and then First Minister, Alex Salmond, and clearly Cameron’s successor thinks she can veto another vote by refusing to pass the necessary legislation.

Mrs May might think this would be legally sound, but unless she wantes to boost support for independence in Scotland and provoke a constitutional crisis it wouldn’t be a wise course of action.

The change from the cuddly rhetoric of listening and consulting to the ‘we’ll make the decisions on Brexit’ and dismissal of the SNP’s democratic mandate to consider calling a second referendum also indicate something else Scots are unlikely to miss.

It seems Theresa May doesn’t consider The Union a true union of equals – flying in the face of the rhetoric from London ahead of the Scottish referendum and the history of how the two countries came to form the UK in the eighteenth century.

But one thing is clear – the gloves are off and we seem set on course for a showdown over whether Scotland remains in the EU rather than the UK.

The unionist media in London and Scotland already seem to believe this is coming and have settled upon Scots Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, as the leader of the anti-independence campaign when the next indyref comes.

She is being given extensive coverage, much of it fawning, on the back of leading the Tories to second place in the Scottish election in May.

I’m not sure this is either justified or wise.

Yes, she led the Tories to their best ever result at a Scottish parliament election with 22% of the vote, but only seven of her MSPs were directly elected from constituencies rather than via the proportional vote for the regional lists.

It’s also worth noting she ran by downplaying her Tory credentials and the Conservatives only won one seat in Scotland at the 2015 UK election

Pro-independence supporters are also already exposing Ms Davidson’s Achilles heel – she is the leader in Scotland of the party that called and lost the Brexit vote which, as things stand, will take Scots out of the EU against their will.

On her side, First Minister Sturgeon is also on less than ideal political ground.

She has made clear she would not want to have another independence vote until it was clear she would win it and, at the moment, the limited opinion polling that’s been done since June 23rd doesn’t suggest a big shift has yet occurred since 2014.

It is very possible that once Article 50 is invoked and talks between London and Brussels get under way – probably next spring – the long-term economic damage from leaving the EU will be clearer and it will focus Scottish voters’ minds.

But Article 50 imposes a timetable on Sturgeon not of her choosing.

A second independence referendum would need to be held before the UK leaves the EU to improve the chances Scotland could remain with the minimum disruption.

All of this means tension between London and Edinburgh will intensify and a second indyef becomes a good bet.

Given the demographics of the first vote and the continued vibrancy of the pro-independence movement, it was already likely there would be a second bite of the cherry for supporters of Scottish independence.

Now, the Brexit vote and – as importantly – the way the government in London is approaching the upcoming talks with the rest of the EU are bringing the end of the United Kingdom ever closer.

In recent weeks you could be forgiven for thinking we were back in the early eighties at the height of the Reagan/Thatcher era’s talking up of the threat from Moscow.

The renewed Russian and Syrian assault on rebel-held east Aleppo and the images of destruction getting out and into western media has stimulated what can only be described as Russophobia to reach new heights, stoked as it is by Washington and London with many journalists and commentators in tow.

The charge list against the Kremlin is long and growing all the time.

President Putin is accused of a litany of wrongdoing from war crimes in Syria and Ukraine to attempting to subvert the US presidential election and funding Europe’s anti-EU populist parties.

Historians can point to a long pedigree for Russophobia, and in Britain it long predated the 1917 Revolution, the rise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

Even though Moscow and London ended up on the same side in the two world wars and during the 1990s, following the collapse of the USSR, Russia was discounted as a weak, declining country of little consequence, the “Russian bear” has generally been portrayed as a rival and a threat in Britain since the imperial rivalry of the nineteenth century – by both politicians and journalists.

Of course, the current Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, is a journalist who went into politics and perhaps that explains his suggestion last week that people should protest about Syria outside the Russian embassy in London – a suggestion that indicates he still has to learn he’s no longer a practitioner of what one former diplomat joked to me is the journalist’s vice – the exercise of power without responsibility.

In the case of the assault on Aleppo, there is truth in the accusation that the bombing is being carried out without much concern for civilian casualties.

But while it may allow the politicians, like Johnson, and media commentators to indulge in righteous indignation and – one suspects – to revel a bit in a feeling of moral superiority, it doesn’t make for good policy or a long-term solution to the war in Syria and the growing impasse in relations between the West and Russia.

The former International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell, allowed his sense outrage to get the better of his judgement when he went on the BBC to call for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Syria – an act which would almost certainly mean going to war with Russia, something no serious western politician has any intention of doing.

Indignation can be constructive.

It can galvanise people to take action to prevent humanitarian abuses or to end armed conflicts where unwitting civilians are caught in the middle.

But selective indignation is counter-productive.

Undermined – as it inevitably is – by hypocrisy and double standards that undermine its moral force.

Be it the British government’s condemnation of Russian action in Syria while remaining relatively quiet about Saudi action in Yemen, or that of supporters of the Stop the War coalition who tend to be muted in criticism of Russia while focusing their ire on the British and Americans over Iraq, Afghanistan and – indeed – Syria.

Or Russia’s condemnation of American and British recognition of Kosovo’s break away from Serbia while subsequently recognising Abkhazia and South Ossetia’s declarations of independence from Georgia.

And that’s before you consider how both sides are capable of sowing disinformation and outright lies to gain advantage.

Remember Russia’s insistence its forces have not been involved in Ukraine or the American refusal to own up for launching a cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear programme.

Moral suasion requires consistency to carry authority.

The old saying “people who live in glasshouses shouldn’t throw stones” isn’t a call to stay silent; but it should be taken as an invocation to avoid hypocrisy if you want your words and actions to carry weight.

Double standards have practical consequences.

As I’ve written elsewhere, they undermine the trust that’s needed between opposing sides if there’s to be much hope of settling the disputes driving conflicts from Ukraine to Syria.

As the government tries to work out what its approach to Brexit will be – and so far its mantra that it won’t give a running commentary seems to be designed as much to hide the lack of substance to its plans as it is to disguise its negotiating strategy – it’s insisting the UK will remain an outward-looking country.

This seems partly designed to counter the impression that may have been given by the vote to leave the EU that the English – and it is primarily the English – are turning their backs to the world.

It also seems designed to reassure investors and businesses and shore up confidence in the economy hit by a 15% devaluation in the pound since the referendum.

That fall may make exports cheaper, but it’s widely predicted to lead to an increase in inflation in an economy that imports more than it exports.

Despite all this, the message about an outward-looking country doesn’t seem to be hitting home.

It’s being drowned out in the inchoate debate – if that is not too strong a word – on what Britain’s post-Brexit place in the world should be.

That’s because there’s another message coming from the upper echelons of the government.

This came through loud and clear in the Prime Minister’s speeches and comments during the Conservative party conference last week.

It was added to by Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s promise to cut immigration and pressure business and universities to reduce the numbers of foreign employees and students, as well as Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s pledge to cut the numbers of non-British doctors in the NHS.

They all seemed to be saying the same thing: foreigners are no longer welcome in the UK.

And the message doesn’t seem to be getting through just to prospective immigrants who maybe considering a move to the UK.

People who’ve come to Britain from other EU countries in good faith over the past 43 years are also feeling uneasy now they’re openly being used as a potential Brexit bargaining chip.

And Theresa May repeated it – in more veiled terms – at her meeting with her Danish counterpart in Copenhagen on Monday when she said: “I expect to be able to guarantee the legal rights of EU nationals already in the UK, so long as the British nationals living in Europe – countries who are member states – receive the same treatment” (my emphasis).

With all this, it’s tempting to treat the outward-looking country rhetoric as just that – rhetoric

And judging from social media many foreign residents in the UK have taken from all this that they aren’t really welcome any more.

Of course, May, Rudd and Hunt were all in the Remain camp – with varying degrees of enthusiasm – before the referendum, so you can understand if, politically, they feel they need to convince the Tory grassroots and the 52% of voters who backed Leave that they are the people to deliver Brexit.

And paradoxically, it is leading Brexiteers, like Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, and International Development Secretary, Priti Patel, who have talked most about the country’s future being an outward-looking one.

But, the rest of the world could be forgiven for missing this when the message from the very top of government is dominated by an expressed intention to keep foreigners out of workplaces, universities and hospitals.

In the face of protests from business, the government has partly rolled back on its proposal that firms report on the numbers of foreigners they employ – they now say firms will have to report them, but the numbers won’t be made public.

If Mrs May and her cabinet colleagues want to dispel the impression they’ve given that post-Brexit Britain is far from being an outward-looking country, they’re going to have to work a bit harder.

They could start by unequivocally guaranteeing that all the people who’ve already come to the UK from other EU countries to live and work are very welcome and there’s no question they could be forced to leave if London doesn’t get what it wants in the upcoming talks.

They also need to bear in mind that 48% of voters opted to remain in the EU on June 23rd and part of why they did so was because they do want to live in an outward-looking country.

The past week has been an unedifying one in the world of international diplomacy.

World leaders have been at the United Nations in New York for their annual gathering at the General Assembly where they immediately disappointed with a watered down agreement to consider reforming how they deal with the growing numbers of refugees.

If that were not enough, the proceedings were then overshadowed by an outbreak of finger pointing between the Americans and Russians over the collapse of the Syrian ceasefire.

Washington accused Russia of bombing the humanitarian convoy in Syria that killed at least 20 and undermining the ceasefire.

Russia denied it was involved. But that hasn’t stopped the Americans continuing to stoke outrage against Moscow in same week the US itself had helped undermine the ceasefire by killing 63 Syrian troops in an air strike – an attack the US insists was unintentional.

Whether or not Russia did carry out the convoy strike, and past experience of the veracity of American allegations in conflicts where it has taken clear sides gives pause for thought (remember Defense Secretary Cohen’s claim ahead of NATO’s attack on Serbia in 1999 that 100,000 Albanians had been killed in Kosovo), Washington’s attempt to take the moral high ground over Syria is undermined by its actions in Yemen.

The Americans are supplying weapons and intelligence in support of the Saudi-led intervention in the Yemeni civil war that’s involved similar attacks on humanitarian workers, particularly hospitals and clinics.

Moscow is unlikely to feel under much pressure to change its approach in Syria as long as Washington doesn’t change its approach to Yemen

And it’s not just the Americans backing the Saudis.

As my former colleague, Robin Lustig, has pointed out in a powerful piece, the UK’s new Prime Minister, Teresa May, has brushed off criticism of British arms sales to Saudi Arabia emphasising Riyadh’s cooperation against Islamist terrorism.

The hypocrisy and double standards of the major powers and their allies – be they the Syrian or Saudi governments – are more than just words though.

With both sides effectively saying “do as I say, not as I do” and, in the eyes of their opponents, being rank dishonest, it makes it extremely difficult to build even the minimum of trust that’s needed for a durable peace effort.

As the siege of Syria’s second city Aleppo intensifies again and the Saudi campaign in Yemen grinds on, there is an urgent need for the main powers to get back round the table and at least agree to stop fuelling the conflicts.

But this week has shown that prospect seems remote.

So, one could forgive ordinary Syrians and Yemenis – living under siege and bombardment or having fled their homes to seek refuge elsewhere – for looking at the images from New York and being reminded of Nero and his proverbial fiddling as Rome burned.

George Monbiot – the environment commentator – wrote a recent cri de coeur on the failure of the media – by which I think he meant most mainstream outlets – to give sufficient coverage to climate change, despite the tumbling of global temperature records and accompanying floods and droughts that are hitting people all over the world.

He’s right of course.

It’s striking how little has been published or broadcast since last December’s United Nations Paris Climate summit agreed to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees.

Do editors think the pledges – and that’s all they were – made in Paris are the last word on climate change?

A recent conversation I had with a former colleague, and a respected environment journalist, suggests they may.

He lamented that he just couldn’t get climate stories on – even with the record temperatures and constant flow of natural disaster stories so-beloved of those same editors.

Surely giving climate change prominent coverage is in the public interest, I observed.

But then, it’s not just climate change where mainstream media journalists are failing the public.

There is also scant coverage of sustainable development.

As I wrote last year, when all UN member states came together in a historic agreement on the Sustainable Development Goals that aim to produce a fairer world which actually has a long-term future, there was barely a peep of interest.

And things haven’t changed since then.

The first high level meeting to review progress towards the SDGs a couple of weeks ago, where 22 countries reported what they have done and plan to do, was largely ignored by the media.

If you do an internet search you’ll find stories on specialist development blogs and a few niche business news sites, but little else.

The only mainstream media outlet I could find that published anything was The Guardian, which actually has a development sub-index on its website. Although, even that merits only a qualified welcome given the Guardian gets the Gates Foundation to subsidise this coverage, suggesting even the editors there still don’t see development as deserving of much coverage purely on its own merits.

So why are journalists largely ignoring sustainable development?

Well, partly it’s because they are subject to the tyranny of the urgent over the important – there always seems to be something more immediate they judge needs reporting.

But they also fail to see development as a story because they’re prone to what I’d call a tramline mentality. There are certain kinds of stories they’re used to covering – be it political rows, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, or even changes in interest rates – and they think they know how to cover them.

It means they stay in their comfort zone, but it’s a failure journalistic imagination.

How to break out of this compartmentalised thinking?

One way may be to create new indices on websites and in papers to encourage journalists to see the importance of sustainable development stories.

Many papers and news sites already have “environment” pages or indices – which is not just a way to help users navigate stories, but also, I’d argue, a reflection of how journalists categorise stories in their own minds.

So one suggestion I’ve heard – and will repeat here – is to rename those indices “people and planet”.This may help editors and reporters to think about environment and development, and their impact on people’s lives – the all-important human interest angle – as deeply entwined and interrelated.

Then there is the public interest argument.

What could be more important than the future of the planet we all depend on for our very existence?

Yet, many of the editors who respond to criticism of their coverage of the foibles – and worse – of politicians by citing the public interest (even when the scale of that coverage risks turning the public off) are the same ones who routinely ignore or underplay sustainable development.

If editors don’t see coverage of such existential matters as in the public interest, there is a more mundane, but perhaps more familiar, reason for covering the issue.

That old hoary chestnut “the way taxpayers’ money is spent”.

There has been a lot of media scrutiny over the past year in the UK of the foreign aid budget, including from outlets which, shall we say, are not well-known for their international coverage.

So there is already an appetite for covering development aid.

It’s also becoming clear that from now on much of that aid is going to be prioritised according to the commitments made in Sustainable Development Goals.

So, with a bit of joining up of the dots, there may be hope that editors, who up to now have had little interest in covering the SDGs and international development, could be persuaded that there are good reasons for changing their approach.

Eleven years on, King’s comment came to mind as the UK parliament debated and approved air strikes on Islamic State in Syria at the same time as delegates from more than 190 countries were meeting at the UN climate summit in Paris to try to agree a deal to prevent catastrophic climate change.

The Syria vote took up many more column inches than the goings on in Paris despite the presence of world leaders, including Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, at the opening of the summit.

Polls in Britain about the most important issues facing the World, indicate terrorism is seen as a much greater threat than global warming. It also seems public concern about climate change has declined since the last disappointing key UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009.

Why should this be when the scientific consensus is that unless the world takes measures now global temperatures will rise by more than 2 degrees and cause catastrophic changes in the climate that will pose a grave threat to all of humanity?

Some climate scientists think it’s partly their fault. They believe they gave people the impression climate change would be more dramatic and also that it may be too late to do much about it. But climate change is likely to be gradual and psychology suggests if people think they can’t do much about something, they will most likely carry on as usual.

But political leaders and the media also bear some responsibility.

When there is a terrorist attack, there is frequent talk about terrorism as an existential threat.

According to the dictionary “existential” means “relating to existence”. So an “existential threat” to the UK is something that threatens the very survival of the country.

Does the Prime Minister really believe IS poses a threat to Britain’s national survival in the same way Nazi Germany did in 1940?

Surely not?

But he is not alone in using this language – other politicians and media commentators have also liberally used the cliché – and it is bound to have an impact on public perceptions.

Anecdotally, I know well-informed people who agree with this assessment of the scale of the IS threat and dismiss climate change as exaggerated – when it is precisely the other way round.

The frog in boiling water is the analogy that’s used to explain the lack of urgency about taking action to combat global warming. Then there’s the fact that because climate science is developing all the time, there is always an element of uncertainty about it, even if the broad trends are clear.

However, there’s already evidence that climate change will disrupt our way of life and threaten the existence of states.

The Pentagon and other defence ministries now recognise climate change as a threat to national security and see it as a driver of conflict.

The conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region, which the UN estimates has killed around 300,000 and displaced almost 3 million, has also been linked to drought caused by long-term changes in climate.

Another problem when it comes to public perceptions of the two is that while terrorist attacks are sudden and shocking – that is the whole point of them in the eyes of the people carrying them out – climate change is incremental.

We humans also seem to find it far easier to empathise with the relatively small numbers of victims of sudden random violence than we do the large numbers whose lives are threatened by an creeping menace like climate change.

I don’t intend to diminish the impact terrorism has on its victims and their loved ones.

If you are unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity of a terrorist attack then it is an existential threat to you.

But, unless you live in a handful of countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, Nigeria, Somalia or Afghanistan,terrorism is not a threat to the future of your country. It’s also not a threat to human existence. Climate change, on the other hand, probably is.

Alistair Burnett

Alistair Burnett is a journalist and analyst with 25 years of experience in BBC News. From 2004-2014, he was Editor of The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 and before that was Editor of Newshour on BBC World Service. He has a particular interest in international relations and the implications of the shifting power relations in the world which are challenging the traditional western dominance of global affairs.